Longworth at Large: Time for Trump to go

According to a recent poll, 61 percent of all Americans believe Donald Trump should be impeached if he is proven guilty of sexual misconduct. But if he is removed from office, it probably won’t be because of his behavior toward women. It will more likely be due to his behavior in general.

I first wrote about Donald Trump’s erratic behavior in August of 2016. In that column I cited a number of incidents that many people found disturbing, among them: his mocking of a disabled reporter; his suggestion that Meghan Kelly couldn’t effectively moderate a debate because she might be on her menstrual cycle; his berating of a Muslim Gold Star family who had lost a son in combat; his referring to a Black man at one of his rallies as “My African American”; his saying that the world would be a safer place if more countries had nuclear weapons; and, his suggesting to a crowd of supporters that if Hillary was elected, they might consider taking a shot at her. Unfortunately, the lunacy and insensitivity didn’t abate after Trump was elected.

Since taking office, Mr. Trump has obsessed with the results of his election, claiming that he would have won the popular vote had it not been for the 3 million illegals who cast ballots for Hillary. His claim has since been disproven, yet he chooses to ignore the facts. He even ignores his own words. Last year he admitted to and apologized for the language he used on the “Access Hollywood” tape, but now he says the recording is not authentic. Last month he used an ethnic slur while staging a photo op with a group of Navajo war heroes, and after Senator Kirsten Gillibrand called for him to resign over his alleged sexual misdeeds, Trump responded by implying that she is a prostitute. He has also alienated just about every one of our allies, including the British, who took great offense at Trump’s retweeting of anti-Muslim footage from a fascist group that has been denounced by the British government. Stephen Doughty, a member of Parliament, said, “Trump is either a racist, incompetent, unthinking, or all three.”

It’s hard to explain Donald Trump’s inability to understand the consequences of his words or the difference between reality and fantasy. Former Defense Secretary Leon Panetta said of Trump, “He wanders between the real world and the world of Donald Trump.” Iconic investigative journalist Carl Bernstein said of Trump’s tweets, “What we see is a road map of his mind, and it’s a very disturbing road map.” And David Gergen, former advisor to four Presidents, commented, “Trump is living in his own reality.” Those assessments of President Trump are consistent with the warnings about candidate Trump, which were issued last year by scores of highly respected individuals, including 50 former national security officials and Cabinet officers. In an open letter last Summer, the group wrote that if Trump was elected, he would be the most reckless President in our history. Former CIA director Michael Morell went even further, saying Trump, “may well pose a threat to our national security, and would be a dangerous Commander in Chief.” And last year’s Libertarian Vice Presidential nominee William Weld, who had served in the Department of Justice, said of Trump, “He has a screw loose.”

But perhaps the most telling criticisms have come from a group of respected mental health professionals who recently published a compilation of their observations in a book titled, The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump, in which they diagnose the President as having a variety of behavioral problems including Narcissistic Personality Disorder. Tony Schwartz, who assisted with the book, and who co-authored Trump’s 1987 bio, “The Art of the Deal”, told CNN recently that “He [Trump] doesn’t have a conscious, and he doesn’t have an internal moral arbiter.” Translation? Trump isn’t fit for office. Editors at the New York Daily News agree. Following Trump’s retweeting of the anti Muslim video, the Daily News published an editorial titled, “Donald Trump is a Mad Man”, and wrote, “After his latest spasm of deranged tweets, only those completely under his spell can deny what growing numbers of Americans have long suspected: the President is profoundly unstable. He is mad. He is, by any honest layman’s definition, mentally unwell.” Following his sexist tweet to Sen. Gillibrand, Trump was also blasted by the editors at USA Today who wrote, “Donald Trump is unfit to clean the toilets at Obama’s Presidential library.”

Trump should do the right thing and resign, but he won’t. And, so long as Republicans control Congress, impeachment for any reason is unlikely. That’s why the least painful alternative would be for Trump’s Cabinet to invoke the 25th Amendment and remove him from office due to mental incapacitation.

Schwartz recently told CNN that Trump acts like “a 9-year-old child”. If that’s the case, then let’s get him out of the White House, and give him a chance to grow up in his own house.